SF new web site.

I actually love the site. In my mind, the Six flags website designs were always a couple steps ahead of the other chains. I remember they were the first to feature the fancy java applets, and the first to have falsh. Yes they are a little buggy in the beginning....so what. I doubt they expected that some enthusiasts with no lives would surf their website just to see how many inconsistencies they can find...

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Welcome to Planet Nupe!

Sigh..

Maybe I can shed some light on things (being the worlds largest Six Flags suckup and all).

When Six Flags originally had the company design their previous website, they had certain obligations in the contact for updates and modifications to make to the site as they went along.

They didn't.

Contract expires, Six Flags hires a new firm to take over design of website. New marketing company makes lots of mistakes, and mainly they wait a week waiting on AOL Time Warner to approve the use of certain graphics.

Site upload begins at 8pm last night. Microsoft SQL box vomits and dies, causing much grief (broken links, images, scripts, etc). The site actually was online 2 days you couldn't see, it's just when it went "live", for some reason, it really really messed up the SQL server.

Lesson learned? DON'T RUN IIS AS YOUR WEBSERVER. (and I don't wanna hear anything pro Coasterbuzz since it runs on IIS.. I've used linux and apache since 1997 for my personal server box, and am forced to use IIS at work, and I see first HAND which of the two is better from an operating and security standpoint)

Anyone that runs a huge site (and SixFlagsHouston.Com has hundreds of pages with over 500 megs of data online) knows that when you go from one design to another, there WILL be mistakes and problems. Amplifying the problem is when you have deadlines to meet because of contracts that have been signed. And a marketing company that doesn't have a single coaster enthusiast on the team to know where the glaring errors are. The parks did not get much time to proof the site before it went live (come on, PR departments are busy enough with new capital as it is, AND several of the parks use a Marketing Firm instead of actual people in the park themselves!)

Yes, there will be "fact correcting" over the next few days.

There is an old saying... "you can't please all of the people all of the time"... so I just go for insulting everyone.. much easier. With that said "Get a life, people.. you take your hobby a little toooo seriously."

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Panther Modern
SixFlagsHouston.Com
An Astroworld Tribute Site

The site is working very good for me, Has anyone noticed when u click on sfgram's surperman link the ride was introduced in 1988?? Didn't know that we had the ride all this time. ;-)

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Six Flags Great America Rules, I finally get to fly this year

Six Flags Doesn't run their web site! Ackerman & McQueen out of OK City do it for them.
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never met a coaster I didn't ride (except Junior Geminii) :(

I like the layout and color scheme, as well as the overall look and feel of the new site. Much better than the old one. My only complaint is the damn 'Pick a Park' section that's done in Flash. It's way too slow for me, and I much prefer quick, funtional links to useless, fancy animated ones that waste my time. My favorite site Six Flags has produced was the old white Flash site. At least the animations were super-fast then.

Also, the associated photos (and names, for Pete's sake!)with many of the rides is inexcusable, as others have mentioned. False advertising at its best. Reminds me of their wonderful commercials that show SFMM's Viper's loops when their advertising SFA's S:RoS.

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-Vater
'These pretzels are making me thirsty.'
Take a ride...

I love the fact that Superman UF at SFGAM was introduced in 1988. Hilarious. Maybe they should have built the website before opening it to the public.

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BMCOASTER

bmcoaster@wi.rr.com

The site is ok, but it is sad that a corporate site like that would have so many errors in it. I am a webmaster for a large pharmaceutical patient wellness website and we would never release anything that bug ridden. Our website goes through the same exacting testing process that our pharmacy software goes through and is consistantly monitored for unexpected errors or problems. The kind of hack job that was done to put this Six Flags site up is just inexcusable. If those developers were working for me they would be collection unemployment tomorrow.

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Bob Hansen

Operation Wicked Twister
Goal: Lose enough weight (50lbs) to ride Wicked Twister in 2K3
Progress: 21 pounds since 1-1-2003

Panther: I don't doubt that you were told what you were, but the information is not correct. Here's why.

SQL Server and IIS have absolutely zero to do with each other. SQL Server houses data and has nothing to do with broken images. Furthermore, SQL Server doesn't just "puke" without provocation. We use it at my current job to house hundreds of gigs of data, more than any Web site ever would, and it never misses a beat. Ever.

IIS is no less secure than any other platform for Web serving. More vulnerabilities are found in Linux servers every year than in Windows servers (according to Gartner or one of those research firms), but it's a lot harder to pin blame on any one company (like you can with Microsoft). But like anything technology related, you need to know and understand how to use it. Because it's based on Windows, that gives people the false sense that they know what they're doing. Frequently they do not.

And consider this... CoasterBuzz ran for three years on the same ASP code, on IIS with SQL as the back end. It never crashed, always worked, save for hardware upgrades and connectivity issues caused by Sprint or my former ISP. Now, even better, it runs on .Net code, and it's faster than ever. Not bad considering I've yet to tweak anything.

Microsoft is far from perfect, but blind faith and religious devotion to any other platform is asking for trouble as well.

Of course an agency did the site, but that's no excuse for poor deployment. The staging to production deployment scheme is old as time, and final deployment should never be harder than flipping a switch. Part of testing is proofing your content. Project management 101, and obviously not followed here.

And Nate, I have better things to do than find the threads, but people hated the Paramount color scheme, the Knott's and MiA sites were trashed and I personally have taken stabs at CP's site (before I did business with the firm that produces it ;)).

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Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com - Sillynonsense.com
"The world rotates to The Ultra-Heavy Beat!" - KMFDM
*** This post was edited by Jeff 3/6/2003 1:40:29 PM ***

Yay! Look at the SFGAm map, Shock Wave is on it! I guess ill be able to ride it again this season! Yahooo! ;)

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The Demon He's gonna getchya!

That's also a 2002 map. The 2003 maps probably aren't finished yet.

Jeff: I guess I just haven't seen bashing of any site like the bashing that went on earlier in this thread (which was obviously premature anyway). It's stupid to complain about how bad a site is, then complain when they fix some of the most common complaints. It kind of follows how people bash SF as a company no matter what they do, and I was just pointing that out. I'd believe a few people complained about color schemes and such on the Paramount site, but I certainly haven't seen a two-page topic devoted only to trashing a site.

-Nate

Yeah... you're right, the flash pick a park is way too slow. That's why I use the drop down box right below it. The Flash pick a park is to entertain the families, not the enthusiasts that go just to check one or two things. Some of the pictures are pretty bad, and the Batman Knight Flight page kinda looks like some got confused, as opposed to done delibrately. While the large amount of mistakes may be unexcuseable, they did fix many quickly, and as long as they work on changing the pictures and stats to be correct, I won't rag on them too much.

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- GeaugaDog
Ain't Nuthin but the Dog in me..
Don't believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see...

I wasn't trashing Six Flags, I was trashing the agency that did the site.

You know, Panther's comment about the previous developer having to maintain and update the site is interesting to. Who builds static sites anymore that can't be updated by the client? I mean, the very site you're looking at can be maintained by anyone with the right security credentials, piece of cake. Content management isn't a new concept.

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Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com - Sillynonsense.com
"The world rotates to The Ultra-Heavy Beat!" - KMFDM

Big fan of this description of the Ninja at SFoG. Funny, it was the first coaster I checked.

http://www.sixflags.com/parks/overgeorgia/rides/ninja.asp?id=rides&rideid=thrills

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I'm not an enthusiast, I just play one on message boards.

I love the layout, hate the loading times and inaccuracies. Why couldn't they hire somebody who codes PHP? ;)

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SFNE Central v4- Online Six Flags New England Resource
CBuzzer since September 2001 with a few bumps along the way. :)

The funniest thing I saw was on the WoA Thrill Rides page. It has a picture of the flyer Superman with the description of the "U-Shaped" Superman.

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SFNE Freak said:
Why couldn't they hire somebody who codes PHP? ;)

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Probably because most PHP'ers haven't graduated from high school yet. ;)

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Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com - Sillynonsense.com
"The world rotates to The Ultra-Heavy Beat!" - KMFDM

So what if I haven't graduated from high school yet? lol

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SFNE Central v4- Online Six Flags New England Resource
CBuzzer since September 2001 with a few bumps along the way. :)

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Homey G. said:
Big fan of this description of the Ninja at SFoG. Funny, it was the first coaster I checked.

http://www.sixflags.com/parks/overgeorgia/rides/ninja.asp?id=rides&rideid=thrills

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Priceless. Especially when looking at the picture next to it.

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-Vater
'These pretzels are making me thirsty.'
Take a ride...
*** This post was edited by Vater 3/6/2003 3:57:21 PM ***

I think the layout is great, but what still bugs me from the previous site is the lack of uniqueness, which I think shows more in the new site. Pictures of rides that aren't from the park are everywhere on each park's site. I would love it if they had new, better pictures, especially of the exact ride so people can tell what it looks like in the park, and maybe even where in the park. Example- on SFNE's site they have a picture of Cyclone when Black Widow was there. Oh well, I'm still ok with the site. I guess that's what fan sites are for.

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I lost my hat on Poison Ivy. How pathetic.

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Cameron said:
The site is fine, quite your whinging!

It seems that they launch a new site near the start of each new season .. Which seems to make sense for me.

And I hardly think anyone on here can gripe about the new colour scheme of that site .. when the new colour scheme here is anything but plesent!

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Cameron Silver

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The color scheme and designs are fine. But it is embarrassing to think that they don't even know the difference between Batman Knight Flight and Batman the Dark Knight, on their OWN site. No one is whining here, or as you call it "Whinging". They should have waited to make sure they had no errors before launching this misleading website.
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If you haven't rode Raging Bull in the back row you haven't lived. The feeling on that first drop cannot be explained in words!